A group of Florida-based treasure hunters recently recovered hundreds of coins from a 300-year-old shipwreck off the Atlantic coast this week.
One of the divers called last month’s discovery “almost numbing.”
“You don’t expect it,” boat captain Grant Gitschlag told FOX 35 on Friday. “You always hope for it, but you never expect it.”
Corinne Lea, another treasure hunter, acknowledged that it wasn’t planned “at all” but that it’s “how the greatest discoveries happen.”
Finding the 214 coins and other items they salvaged from the Spanish shipwrecks known as the Treasure Fleet of 1715 is rare, they explained, because they have been salvaged for decades.
“To get this kind of quantity in a few days is a very exciting start,” Gitschlag told the station.
The group contracts with Sal Guttuso, owner of 1715 Fleet Queen’s Jewels LLC, the exclusive salvager of the wrecks and custodian of the U.S. District Court.
The hunters are now working to clean the coins of 300 years of sea dust to make them shine again, then are ready to head out again to see what else awaits them.
The fleet set sail for Spain from Cuba in July 1715, laden with goods and treasures from the New World, but much of the fleet sank in a hurricane a week later, according to the 1715 Queen’s Fleet Jewels LLC.
“It’s a find. It’s all about discovery,” Lea said. “I love the story, being the first person in 309 years to find what was lost in tragedy.”
New York Post
